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Posts published by Gary Gutting

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

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Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times

It is a staple of American politics to criticize those who vote simply out of their own self-interest. Democrats often denounce the superrich for supporting candidates who promise to lower their taxes; Republicans frequently say workers opposed to free trade put their job security over the nation’s economic health. In particular, it’s easy to think of elections as primarily a clash between conflicting economic interests.

Voting to benefit those in need is admirable, but that is not the same as a moral obligation.

But political scientists disagree. True, the richer you are the more likely you are to vote Republican, and the poorer you are the more likely you are to vote Democratic. But in the last presidential election, more than 40 percent of those with incomes over $200,000 a year voted Democratic, and more than 30 percent with incomes under $25,000 voted Republican. Political ideology was a much stronger factor than economic self-interest. Independent of income, 87 percent of those falling into the category “steadfast conservatives” voted Republican in 2012, while 90 percent of “solid liberals” voted Democratic. (But this election’s focus on middle-class wage losses might increase self-interested voting.)

The statistical issue, however, is only about what factors have the most influence on political behavior. People do, nonetheless, often vote out of self-interest. My question is when, if ever, is it right to vote simply for the sake of your own self-interest?

Some philosophers argue that self-interested voting is always wrong and that we should vote instead for what we see as best for society as a whole (the “common good”). There may be cases where my self-interest happens to coincide with the common good. A tax cut or a minimum wage from which I profit may be good for the economy as a whole. But it’s naïve to think that’s true of every tax deduction and credit that serves a personal or corporate self-interest. It’s tempting, therefore, to think that I’m wrong to vote my self-interest when it’s opposed to the common good.

But what about the poor who vote for welfare programs that benefit them? Read more…

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

Those of us in favor of stronger laws to abate gun violence mostly support our cause by arguing against the claims of the gun lobby (roughly, the N.R.A. and gun manufacturers). It should by now be obvious that this is a waste of time. The case for action is overwhelming, but there’s no chance of convincing the entrenched minority who are so personally (or financially) invested in gun ownership. Legislative efforts have failed because the opposition is more deeply committed — more energized, more organized, more persistent.

My purpose here is not to continue arguing with the gun lobby or even to discuss the precise form that new gun legislation should take. Instead, I’m interested in understanding the intensity gap and how we might overcome it. Only when there’s a sustained passion against gun violence will there be a meaningful chance of effective action.

Our permissive gun laws are a manifestation of racism, an evil that, in other contexts, most gun-control advocates see as a fundamental threat to American society.

It might seem that fear of gun violence is the great motivator. Pro-gun advocates see guns as our best defense against armed criminals. Anti-gun advocates see the wide availability of guns as a greater threat than criminal violence. The issue seems to come down to what you fear more: criminals or guns.

But the passion of the gun lobby goes much deeper than fear of criminals. As Firmin DeBrabander’s excellent book, “Do Guns Make Us Free?” demonstrates, the basic motivation of the pro-gun movement is freedom from government interference. They talk about guns for self-defense, but their core concern is their constitutional right to bear arms, which they see as the foundation of American freedom. The right to own a gun is, as the N.R.A. website puts it, “the right that protects all other rights.” Their galvanizing passion is a hatred of tyranny. Like many other powerful political movements, the gun lobby is driven by hatred of a fundamental evil that it sees as a threat to our way of life — an existential threat — quite apart from any specific local or occasional dangers.

The intensity gap exists because opponents of gun violence have no corresponding deep motivation. We cite suicide rates, urban violence, and, especially, mass shootings as horrors requiring more effective gun laws. But few of us actually see guns as existential threats to fundamental American values. In this, however, we are mistaken. Our permissive gun laws are a manifestation of racism, an evil that, in other contexts, most gun-control advocates see as a fundamental threat to American society. Read more…

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

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Credit Brennan Linsley/Associated Press

This interview, the latest in a series on political topics, discusses philosophical issues concerning the criminalization of drug use. My interviewee is Douglas Husak, professor of philosophy at Rutgers University. He is the author of “Overcriminalization: The Limits of the Criminal Law.” – Gary Gutting

Gary Gutting: A bill moving through Congress is proposing reductions in sentences for violations of drug laws. Some critics of the bill, including The New York Times editorial board, think it doesn’t go nearly far enough. What’s your view?

Douglas Husak: I’d go much further, at least regarding penalties for drug use. I think it’s a serious moral wrong to send people to prison for the recreational use of drugs such as marijuana, cocaine, and heroin. What we need is a total decriminalization of drug use.

G.G.: What leads you to that conclusion?

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Douglas HusakCredit

D.H: Everyone agrees it is seriously unjust to punish people in the absence of very good reasons to do so. But the case in favor of punishing people for using drugs has never been made.

G.G.: I suppose popular thinking is roughly that punishment is a good way to deter people from doing something that they would otherwise be very tempted to do and that may well lead to terrible consequences if they do it. The pleasure that drugs bring makes them attractive, and the consequences of using them can be overwhelmingly hideous. So, unless there’s reason to think that the consequences of drug use are not as bad as we think or that no form of punishment is likely to deter drug use, then it seems reasonable to punish it.

The goals of drug-law enforcement are valuable. The problem is that far too many innocent drug users get caught in the net and suffer as a result.

D.H.: I think it’s wrong to punish people just to get them not to do something bad. That principle would allow us to punish overeating, smoking, failing to exercise, and lots of other activities that virtually no one proposes to punish. Most crimes we punish (murder, rape, robbery) do serious harm to other people. Almost all people who do drugs at most harm only themselves. The hideous effects of drugs on users and their families we hear so much about occur in only a very small minority of instances. Most drug users do not suffer substantial harms, and we should be cautious about generalizing from worst-case scenarios. We should not subject tens of millions of Americans to punishment because of bad effects that materialize in only a small subset of cases. In addition, threats of punishments don’t do much to deter drug use. Most drug users don’t believe they’ll be caught, and they are right.Read more…

This interview, the latest in a series on political topics, discusses philosophical issues concerning feminism. My interviewee is Nancy Fraser, professor of philosophy and politics at The New School. She is the author of “Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis.” – Gary Gutting

Gary Gutting: You’ve recently written: “As a feminist, I’ve always assumed that by fighting to emancipate women I was building a better world — more egalitarian — just and free. But lately I’ve begun to worry that . . . our critique of sexism is now supplying the justification for new forms of inequality and exploitation.” Could you explain what you have in mind?

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Nancy FraserCredit

Nancy Fraser: My feminism emerged from the New Left and is still colored by the thought of that time. For me, feminism is not simply a matter of getting a smattering of individual women into positions of power and privilege within existing social hierarchies. It is rather about overcoming those hierarchies. This requires challenging the structural sources of gender domination in capitalist society — above all, the institutionalized separation of two supposedly distinct kinds of activity: on the one hand, so-called “productive” labor, historically associated with men and remunerated by wages; on the other hand, “caring” activities, often historically unpaid and still performed mainly by women. In my view, this gendered, hierarchical division between “production” and “reproduction” is a defining structure of capitalist society and a deep source of the gender asymmetries hard-wired in it. There can be no “emancipation of women” so long as this structure remains intact.

Mainstream feminism is focused on encouraging educated middle-class women to “lean in” and “crack the glass ceiling” — in other words, to climb the corporate ladder. By definition, then, its beneficiaries can only be women of the professional-managerial class.

G.G.: Why can’t responding to feminist concerns be seen as just one major step in correcting the social and economic flaws of our capitalist society, not a fundamental transformation of the system?

N.F.: It certainly can be seen that way. But I am questioning whether today’s feminism is really advancing that process. As I see it, the mainstream feminism of our time has adopted an approach that cannot achieve justice even for women, let alone for anyone else. The trouble is, this feminism is focused on encouraging educated middle-class women to “lean in” and “crack the glass ceiling” – in other words, to climb the corporate ladder. By definition, then, its beneficiaries can only be women of the professional-managerial class. And absent structural changes in capitalist society, those women can only benefit by leaning on others — by offloading their own care work and housework onto low-waged, precarious workers, typically racialized and/or immigrant women. So this is not, and cannot be, a feminism for all women!

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But that is not all. Mainstream feminism has adopted a thin, market-centered view of equality, which dovetails neatly with the prevailing neoliberal corporate view. So it tends to fall into line with an especially predatory, winner-take-all form of capitalism that is fattening investors by cannibalizing the living standards of everyone else. Worse still, this feminism is supplying an alibi for these predations. Increasingly, it is liberal feminist thinking that supplies the charisma, the aura of emancipation, on which neoliberalism draws to legitimate its vast upward redistribution of wealth.Read more…

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

One benefit of teaching introductory philosophy to undergraduates is that it lets you talk about philosophy with eager and intelligent people who do not come with predispositions formed by years of technical study. This semester, preparing for a philosophy seminar with first-year honors students at Notre Dame, I reread with fresh eyes one of philosophy’s best-known arguments for belief in God — Pascal’s wager.

The argument, made by the 17th -century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal, holds that believing in God is a good bet at any odds, since the possible payoff — eternal happiness — far outweighs any costs of believing — even of believing in a God who does not exist.

Most discussions of Pascal’s wager take it as a peculiar if not perverse calculation of self-interest. As Pascal puts it: “If you win, you win everything; if you lose, you lose nothing.” Taken this way, the argument seems morally suspect; William James noted that those who engaged in such egotistic reasoning might be among the first that God would exclude from heaven. In considering it again, I found what I think may be a more fruitful way of developing the wager argument. Read more…

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

This interview, the seventh in a series on political topics, discusses philosophical issues concerning the morality of war. My interviewee is Cecile Fabre, professor of political philosophy at the University of Oxford. She is the author of “Cosmopolitan War.” — Gary Gutting

GARY GUTTING: Many readers will be familiar with the so-called just war theory, with most people seeing, for example, World War II as a just war on the Allied side and an unjust war on the Axis side. To what extent do you think this traditional theory is relevant to wars and other sorts of military interventions in the 21st century?

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Cecile FabreCredit

CECILE FABRE: It is relevant, with some modifications. For example, the traditional theory holds that a just war must be in the defense of the homeland whereas most theorists now argue that defending civilian populations from gross abuses at the hands of their regime, or of factions within their country, is also a just cause. Similarly, it’s now widely held that not only sovereign states have a right to wage war but also those rebelling against (for example) a colonial regime, a foreign occupier or their own grossly abusive government. This is important, because most contemporary wars are civil wars. I agree with both these modifications.

It’s very easy to label one’s opponent “evil”; it’s also remarkably easy to target innocent people on the grounds that the alternative seems to be worse when, in fact, it’s possible to contain, though not destroy, that opponent, at a lesser and more acceptable moral cost.

G.G.: Traditional theory also holds that only soldiers, not civilians, are legitimate targets in war. How has this standard fared in discussions of modern warfare?

C.F.: Many contemporary conflicts are, in terms of conventional war, fought between vastly unequal belligerents. The weaker side often has little option other than to hide themselves among their own civilians in order to make it very difficult for the enemy to kill them, or to pretend that they are civilians in order to better approach and kill the enemy. So some modern theorists have questioned the strict exclusion of attacks on civilians.

G.G.: What’s your view of the morality of this sort of asymmetrical warfare?

C.F.: I think it’s almost always immoral. I very much doubt that the militarily weak can, generally, succeed against the militarily powerful while abiding by the moral principles regulating conventional warfare. I also think that a conventional military force can generally win against immoral tactics only by itself violating the traditional moral principles of just war. But those moral principles are too important, too fundamental, for us to condone abandoning them except to avert the most grievous evil. So my view is that almost all contemporary asymmetrical wars are immoral. Read more…

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

This interview, the sixth in a series on political topics, discusses philosophical issues concerning economic policy. My interviewee is Daniel Hausman, professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of “Preference, Value, Choice and Welfare.” — Gary Gutting

Gary Gutting.: It would seem that in situations like the current Greek crisis, we should be able to rely on economics to tell us which policies are most likely to work. But does the discipline have sufficient predictive power to play an important role in our debates about public policy?

Economists do not practice pure science. They evaluate policies almost exclusively by examining how well they satisfy people’s preferences.

Daniel Hausman: Speaking of predictive power can be misleading. Scientists (and I include economists) are not fortunetellers. Their theories only allow them to predict what will happen if initial conditions are satisfied. Elementary physics enables us to predict how long it will take an object to fall to the ground, provided that gravity is the only force acting on the object. Predicting how long it will take a leaf falling from a tree to reach the ground or where it will land is a much harder problem.

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Daniel HausmanCredit Robert Streiffer

The problems that we want economists to help us solve are more like predicting how leaves will fall on a windy day than predicting how objects will fall in a vacuum. Economic phenomena are affected by a very large number of causal factors of many different kinds. The Greek economic crisis is extraordinarily complex, and it has as many political causes as economic ones. Standard economic theory provides useful tools, but it focuses on a very limited range of causal factors — mainly the choices of millions of consumers, investors and firms — which it simplifies and assumes to be governed entirely by self-interested pursuit of goods or financial gain. When one recognizes all the other factors that affect economic outcomes, from government policies to the whims of nature, it is easy to see that economists cannot predict the economic future with any precision.

In John Stuart Mill’s view, which I believe is basically correct, economics is a separate and inexact science. It is separate from the other social sciences, because it focuses on only a small number of the causal factors that influence social phenomena. It is inexact because the phenomena with which it deals are influenced by many other causes than the few it focuses on.Read more…

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

This interview, the fifth in a series on political topics, discusses philosophical issues concerning political disagreement. My interviewee is Jerry Gaus, professor of philosophy at the University of Arizona. He is the author of “The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World.” — Gary Gutting

Gary Gutting: Many people think the greatest obstacle to solving our national problems is the large ideological gap between the right and the left. They think that to make any significant progress, we need a shared vision of what sort of society we want. Your work on the diversity of values underlying political debates seems to challenge this view. Could you give our readers a basic sketch of your position?

Life in a free and open society requires living on publicly equal terms with strangers one may well loathe.

Jerry Gaus: You’re quite right: There’s a common assumption that diversity of values and ideological perspectives gets in the way of solving our problems. Let’s suppose we agree that there are certain national problems we need to solve and that, at least approximately, we agree what the contours of a solution would look like. Now there is some very impressive work, for example by Scott E. Page, which rigorously shows how those who see the world in the same way — say they all share a secular worldview or a religious perspective — tend to get caught at the same places in searching for solutions.

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Jerry GausCredit

In seeking to solve problems, homogeneous groups look at things in the same way and agree on the way forward; that works nicely until they get caught at some difficult part of the problem, in which case often no one can see the next step. Seeing the problem in the same way, they hit the same wall. In contrast, in diverse groups people understand, and so approach, problems in different ways, so they get stuck at different points. In this case where one perspective gets stuck, another is apt to see a way forward.

G.G.: But in politics our diverse perspectives typically lead to very different views about what our problems are, as well as about how to solve them.Read more…

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

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Machines dug for coal in front of a power plant near Grevenbroich, Germany.Credit Martin Meissner/Associated Press

This interview, the fourth in a series on political topics, discusses philosophical issues that underlie recent debates about climate change. My interviewee is Dale Jamieson, a professor of environmental studies and philosophy at New York University. He is the author of “Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle to Stop Climate Change Failed — and What It Means for Our Future.” — Gary Gutting

Gary Gutting.: It’s clear that global warming is an established fact, and that a good amount of it is due to human activities. But to what extent can we reliably predict how warming will affect our lives if we do little or nothing about it, or predict the effects of various policies designed to lessen its effects? In other words, does climate science have sufficient predictive reliability to be a good guide to forming public policy?

Dale Jamieson: The difference in scale between what climate models deliver and what managers and planners need has long been a major problem. Our current models make predictions primarily expressed in terms of very abstract constructs such as “mean surface temperature” that are not very useful to decision makers. Work is advancing on regional climate models that would be more useful, but there are multiple ways of trying to build these models and they remain controversial.

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Dale JamiesonCredit Raquelle Stiefler

G.G.: Does this mean that we can’t be reasonably sure that there will be major changes in climate that will seriously disrupt human life?

The only people who could reasonably object to stopping coal use are people who own coal companies or can’t see a life beyond being dependent on those people.

D.J.: Unfortunately it doesn’t mean that at all. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says in its most recent report that “continued emission of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems.” This is a polite way of saying that we’re in for species extinctions, political and social instability, millions of avoidable deaths, and the loss of the world as we know it. We know this will happen globally, that the poorest people will be most vulnerable, and we can make some reasonable predictions about broad regional impacts.Read more…

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

This interview, the third in a series on political topics, discusses philosophical ideas that underlie recent debates about inequality. My interviewee is Elizabeth Anderson, a professor of philosophy and women’s studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of “The Imperative of Integration.” — Gary Gutting

GARY GUTTING: Public policy debates, particularly about economic issues, are often about how to treat people fairly. You argue for “democratic equality,” which says that treating people fairly requires treating them as equals. What do you mean by equality?

ELIZABETH ANDERSON: Talk about equality gets off on the wrong foot if we start from the assumption that it expresses an immediate moral demand to treat everyone the same. Of course, there are thousands of legitimate reasons why people may treat different individuals differently. What egalitarianism objects to are social hierarchies that unjustly put different people into superior and inferior positions.

To argue that taxes on income and wealth limit the freedom wealthy people is like opposing stoplights on the grounds that they limit the freedom of movement of people in cars at red lights.

G.G.: Let’s get specific. What do you see as unequal treatments that are unjust?

E.A.: Of course, there are standard cases of discrimination on the basis of antipathy against, or favoritism towards, arbitrary identity groups — such as race, gender and sexual orientation. But I want to stress the many ways in which unjust social hierarchy is manifested in other ways besides direct discrimination or formally differential treatment. The discrimination/differential treatment idea captures only a small part of what counts as unjust inequality.

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Elizabeth AndersonCredit

On this broader view of unjust inequality, we can see three different types of social hierarchy at work. One is inequalities of standing, which weigh the interests of members of some groups more heavily than others. For example, perhaps out of negligence, a courthouse or hotel may lack elevators and ramps for people in wheelchairs. A law firm may promote a culture of off-hours socializing over drinks between partners and associates that excludes women who need to spend time with their children from opportunities for networking and promotion. As Anatole France noted, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.”